The Furry World from the Inside Out

Tag Archives: zoophilia

LGBT stands for two things: firstly, a delicious sandwich (lettuce, guacamole, bacon & tomato); secondly a group of people who don’t easily fit into a heterosexual, binary gendered world.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are lumped together into LGBT mostly for convenience. The four groups are discriminated against in a similar way and the political action required for equality are much the same. LGBT people can generally be classified as being ‘queer’ which roughly means that they diverge from a traditional sexual or gender identity.

Of course, there are plenty of people who diverge from a traditional sexual or gender paradigm who are neither L, G, B or T. And so we can continually add letters to LGBT until it spells something awesome like TERABULGE, or we can toss a catch-all Q to give us LGBTQ, an acronym which is gaining traction.

We furries are already accepted within the LGBT community to a large extent, which is at least partly due to our own gender and sexual diversity. But I think that there is a strong argument that the entirety of furry can be recognized as a queer identity, a Q, including the 30% or so (according to the 2012 Furrypoll) of us that are heterosexual and cis-gendered.

Scientific research on human sexuality is a relatively new field. The Kinsey Reports, published in 1948 (men) and 1953 (women) (link), were the first attempt to gather data on human sexual behaviour. These were informally updated by Playboy in the 1970s (link), back when it retained some literary relevance, in an attempt to understand the changes brought about by the sexual revolution, and—of course—to provide some salacious reading material.

It took until the early 1980s for researchers to confirm that homosexuality is largely set at birth (ref). This work, controversial at the time, contradicted the prevailing wisdom that male homosexuality came about due to feminization of a male child, caused by an overbearing mother and distant father (the reverse supposedly applied for lesbians). This conclusion was simple enough to make: researchers interviewed a large number of people, asking about their childhood and sexual preference, then looked for correlations. (They found none.) And yet such simple data gathering took more than 30 years after Kinsey to be published.

The science of zoophilia is much less mature. Kinsey asked questions and gathered data (as did Playboy) however the first serious attempt to understand zoophilia was published more than 50 years later, by Dr Hani Milestki in 1999. Miletski’s book suggested that zoophilia may be a legitimate sexual preference: one defined by love, not sex.

Most obviously, so-called ‘feral’ art is ubiquitous, and some animal characters—the cast of The Lion King comes to mind—seem to be minor sex symbols in some circles. More personally, furries sometimes actively denote themselves as zoophiles in social media, perhaps on their Fur Affinity page.

Klisoura’s Furry Survey, which at its peak received over 9000 annual voluntary responses from furries worldwide, shows that 13-18% of furries self-identify as zoophiles. This does not mean that all these furries have had sexual contact with a non-human animal; these furries are probably just reporting sexual attraction. However this is significantly higher than the general population.

George W. Bush is probably the world’s most famous born again Christian. At age 40, he was a borderline-alcoholic, a failed businessman, and the son of a successful politician. He credits a conversation with the Reverend Billy Graham in the mid-1980s, a high-profile preacher and Bush family friend, with turning him around.

Whatever you think of Bush as a politician, and whether you believe his story about rediscovering religion (plenty of people feel it’s a convenient fiction), it’s a compelling narrative: “ne’er-do-well boozehound finds God; becomes president”.

Bush’s story is unique but the sentiment is common amongst born-again Christians. Born-again Christians like Bush credit their faith for showing them the path to becoming a fully realized person. It is a revelatory experience to discover, or rediscover, your direction in life. The strength of that experience is such that born-again Christians are notoriously evangelical about their faith.

One in six furries self-identify as zoophiles. The real number is probably higher.

This piece of information comes courtesy of Klisoura’s survey and I don’t think it would surprise many furs. A quick mental poll of the furries I know — the ones that I’m close enough to have an insight into their sexual preferences — suggest that it’s about right.

Like many things in the furry world, exactly what comprises a zoophile is a little blurry. It’s arguable that furry porn, as appreciated by a large majority of the readers of this blog, might be considered zoophilic. Taking the non-furry world as our reference point, furry erotica is certainly a half-step in the zoophilic direction.

Categories

Monthly Archives

Meta

[adjective][species] is a blog that takes a look at the furry fandom from the inside. The writings here come from a wide variety of furry authors, and cover any and all meta-furry topics that we can get our paws on.